Folks have offered a lot of bargaining advice over the last couple years on this site, the main (perhaps good) point being that you work your way back from the strongest outcome, rather than bargaining with yourself first.
However, I've noticed a certain point floating around: that the cut in Social Security/ Medicare withholding is a threat to the tax structure that upholds it. And really, if you think about it, that point violates that very principle, and worse.
The assumption here is that we can't sell letting the rates on withholding go back up. Why are we assuming this? And more importantly, by assuming this, are we not reinforcing the very tendency we want to avoid?
Democrats should never assume they're automatically going to lose a debate. There's what we think we know about what might work, and what actually might work, and by making that assumption, we've forfeited the debate before we've started.
I don't think we'll get sensible tax rates in America until we decide to make compelling arguments about responsibility, and paying for what you get, and about the obligations of today's generations to the next.
But having internalized the fact of Republican's repeated successes in selling tax cuts over the last few decades, it's like we don't even think of trying to win. We just assume we're going to lose, and give up pre-emptively.
I've seen the Republicans take arguments I assumed they would lose, and they win them anyways. Why? In some part because they actual try, and in some part, because we don't.
Why is the media so silent on the obstruction of the GOP. Why are we allowing it to be silent? Do we just look at that, and say "of course, that is how it is?"
Why aren't we trying to change that? Why aren't we forcing them to change that? Republicans go ballistic when anybody criticizes them, and sad to say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The Left just seems to cynically absorb it, complain about it internally, and let it go.
Of course, they're quick to show how terrible and how over-complicated and how bureaucratically inept we are. Never mind that much of our demonstrated gridlock comes because we have to surmount sixty vote thresholds that no Congress before had to do on a regular basis. Who could do better under such conditions?
I think we've absorbed internally this notion that the Republican's domination is normal, par for the course. We rage at our own politicians to force them to fight this, but the tyranny of mathematics and the Republican's own lockstep organization means that we fail many of the votes, even when they do fight. DADT failed by 57 votes. In past Congresses, that'd be a bloody splendid political victory, guaranteed passage.
You know, I get all sorts of flack from people who tell me that they're holding Obama and their Congressperson's feet the fire, who pride themselves on what accountability they're forcing on our President and the rest. But glaring in its absence, is the anger against the people who really are setting themselves against us, who really are repeatedly, unfairly denying us what in times before simple Democratic principles would grant us. Most of America wants most of what we want. That should be enough, and the fact that it isn't is a national tragedy, and a crippling of our Democracy.
Yet I hear so damn little from our side. We're not protesting in the streets, or at the Senator's offices. We're not making big controversies, political liabilities out of what they're doing, we're not making sure this gets on the evening news.
And you know what? If we do nothing, then we will lose. Even if we regain the House of Representatives, and the Senate, we'll still see this sort of bullshit. And why? Because so far, you could hear a mouse fart, given the silence on the left towards the people who have pushed Democracy out the window time and again on the votes. We don't blame them, we blame ourselves. We blame our own weakness, the fact we don't have solid stalwart Senators, even as the other side bears down on us.
I've seen them do this to us again and again. We would have passed the Middle Class Tax cuts clean if it weren't for them. We would have passed DADT, The DREAM act, a Public Option, Medicare Buy-in, so on and so forth.
Yet we blame ourselves, and make our loudest, most strident voices the ones criticizing the President and Congress for making deals and compromises in the face of this.
Guess what message the media picks up on? Democrats are Weak! They say so themselves! They can't get anything passed! They're not doing anything for people out there! They're letting the bad guys get away with everything!
So, I see the arguments on this site, and it just seems to me that our way of responding to the other side hamstringing our legislative mandate, is for our side to cut the Achille's Tendon as well. We're sabotaging ourselves with this navel gazing, this obsession with holding our own people accountable for something they're not responsible for.
And you know what? I think our politicians have long ago internalized the same BS. We've all gotten nice and cozy with blaming the Democrats for what the Republicans are able to do to us. We're like abused kids, battered wives, who having been attacked for years, have come to think they simply deserve it.
But Goddamnit, we don't deserve it, and the country deserves better, too. It deserves a party of people who haven't decided that all is lost, who haven't told themselves that defeat is inevitable. America deserves a majority that is allowed to function as it is supposed to, and we should be making people simply irate over the notion that the people they voted out can block the legislation of the people they voted in. We let the Republicans write the story, where they are the heroes swinging in to moderate our extremists tendencies, rather than writing the real story, which is one of the Republicans fighting to maintain their extremist policies by denying the will of the people concerning the issues at hand.
We have spent far too much time angry about Obama's deal, and not enought time being angry about the filibuster the Republicans engaged in, which made the necessity of the compromise inevitable, if Obama was going to keep his promise on Middle Class Tax cuts.
Our people cannot deliver on their promise until every act of obstruction agains the majority by the Republicans is answered by a withering barrage of criticism by the left, and by the media. The media is going to pick up, I think, the most sensational, and the most dramatic of the narratives. They're not going to pick up some technocratic complaint, they're going to pick up people out in the streets howling that Democracy is being betrayed. Or, at the very least, Liberal pundits, the professional left, ceasing to blame their own side for everything that goes wrong, and attacking the Right for what they're doing.
If we want people in Washington to show spines, to grow a pair, to go into battle, and make a big brouhaha about things, then why aren't we doing it ourselves? Why are we blaming ourselves, and bitching mainly against Democrats, when this is the intentional and strategic result of a Republican Party Policy?
We are not doomed to lose these battles, if we make it a point to go out and actually fight them. But if we think that, sitting at home, we can just hope and pray that our leaders will show some courage, but do nothing, say nothing, and organize no response ourselves, well then, we are going to be doomed.
This party works best when it's people do not assume that they are powerless to fight for their rights and their interests. The politicians grow their spines when they know that people will back them, that they will be re-elected. The party will win these arguments more when it decides that it wants to win them, and that it can win them.
Daily Kos, in my opinion, does a disservice to its stated cause by simply being a center of liberal discontent for their own party. There is no shortage of such discontent. We have to ask ourselves, though, how much of that discontent would be necessary if we were out there organizing against the Republicans, making a radioactive controversy out of their historic obstruction. They should be held accountable for the current state of things, more than anybody else, and I see little enough of us holding them accountable, holding their feet to the fire.
The Republican's toesies need to get toasty, folks. We've positively charred our own side's feet, and we're wondering why they're hobbling away from us. Let's hold the Republicans accountable for their actions. Let's fight our real enemy, instead of blaming others for not doing what we don't have the inclination to do ourselves.